Inside Blizzard: Battle.netSkywing
This paper intends to describe a variety of the problems Blizzard Entertainment has encountered from a practical standpoint through their implementation of the large-scale online game matchmaking and chat service, Battle.net. The paper provides some background historical information into the design and purpose of Battle.net and continues on to discuss a variety of flaws that have been observed in the implementation of the system. Readers should come away with a better understanding of problems that can be easily introduced in designing a matchmaking/chat system to operate on such a large scale in addition to some of the serious security-related consequences of not performing proper parameter validation of untrusted clients.